The following guide, including the platform checklist below, provide insights into developing successful social media strategies based on a clear understanding of social platform technology, users, opportunities and challenges.
Before we get too deep into analyzing each social media platform, it is always helpful to revisit the benefits of engagement. Benefits for small businesses and nonprofits include:
- Consumer and competitive insights gained from buzz monitoring and user demographic data
- Customer support
- Generating brand awareness and thought leadership
- Online reputation management
- Strategic partnerships and recruiting
The success of your social media marketing program depends on the following factors:
- Transparency
- Honesty
- Relevance
- Value
- Commitment
Without a level of transparency in your social media outreach, your campaign could blow up on your face (just ask United Airlines and Wal-Mart). Even with full disclosure from your marketing team or partners, dishonest messaging can cause more damage than good, as most information can be quickly validated via online fact-checking. All communications should be relevant and add value to the conversation or community, and no campaign can truly succeed unless significant time and resources are committed over a period of time — in other words, social media success is a long-term commitment.
Social media platforms act as "kiosks" for your brand. As such, it is important to provide a centralized resource in order to direct traffic and measure efficacy.
Your corporate website should act as a resource by offering content complementary to social media communities, including articles, press releases, research and tools. The website should also integrate social media elements, including RSS/XML feeds, status updates, comments, ratings, reviews, forum discussions, and linking social badges/icons. The more your site is able to create a sense of community, the greater the likelihood of generating, retaining and converting site visitors.
To get started on your social media marketing program, develop a strategic plan. The first step is to conduct an audit of your current presence (as compared with your top competitors) on search engines and social media sites. Determine where you are and where you need to be.
Ideally, develop a crisis management plan in advance that will address any negative ratings, reviews or comments. Once you have an idea of where you are, develop a cheat sheet to expedite outreach to the social media sites on which you do not have a presence. There are three critical steps to developing a social media marketing plan (otherwise known as MCE2): monitor and measure, create and communicate, and empower and engage. Details are provided below.
The first step in the MCE2 process is to monitor and measure. As with any marketing or communications strategy, it is always best to get a feel for your audience and the tools before developing an overall campaign strategy. For starters, create Google Alerts for your branded terms so you can be notified the moment something on the internet related to your business is published. Also track inbound site traffic via (Google) Analytics filters.
The bottom line is that you need to build your overall strategies based on where your customers live online, and agree on a set of metrics and benchmarks to measure volume and sentiment of conversations, as well as engagement (comments, ratings, etc.) over time. Remember, social media is about engaging in a conversation that is already underway.
Once you've developed an overall social media strategy and set up monitoring and measurement (i.e., web analytics), it's time to reach out. When creating content for social media profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flicker, Twitter, etc.) try to ensure the content is timely, relevant, unique and valuable. Once content is published, make sure that it is properly optimized, syndicated and promoted to your target audiences within those communities and beyond.
- When creating a fan page on Facebook, be sure to utilize Facebook markup language (FBML) and the API to create interesting custom fan pages and applications that get shared virally.
- On LinkedIn, create and manage your own group.
- On Google and Yahoo, create gadgets and widgets respectively.
- Tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck improve profile management for Twitter, while Ping.fm helps syndicate profile "updates" across multiple profiles (including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
- If you've created a blog, make sure to promote posts (via search engine optimization, tagging, and RSS syndication) to social profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Lastly, but most importantly, now that you have a foundation including monitoring, measurement, optimized profiles and valuable content, it's time to engage with your constituents and empower them to become evangelists for your brand.
One of the most powerful forms of generating awareness and credibility within your industry is to engage in knowledge expert communities like Yahoo Answers or LinkedIn Q&A and Groups. Similarly, participating actively in related online communities and threaded forums can create a level of connectivity with customers and prospects that ad dollars can't buy. Furthermore, Twitter and blogs can be more than one-way communications vehicles. By monitoring the blogosphere and Twittersphere for relevant conversations, you can comment, reply and generally engage your audience members on their terms, and bring them back to your site or profiles to continue the conversation and nurture the relationship.
A core component of formulating a social media marketing plan is to understand the ins-and-outs of each of the major social platforms so you can create relevant strategies and tactics around each one. The following outline will help you determine which profiles should be incorporated into your social media marketing plan.
- Community mindset: connect
- Primary demographic: 25 to 45
- Ideal fit for: entertainment, lifestyle brands, and non-profits
- Biggest opportunity: using ads to build fans
- Biggest challenge: few appreciate Facebook advertising
- Metrics: fans, comments, likes, wall posts
- Helpful tools: Lexicon, ad interface, applications, analytics, connect, etc.
- Community mindset: connect
- Primary demographic: 15 to 25
- Ideal fit for: music and entertainment
- Biggest opportunity: providing music samples
- Biggest challenges: noisy; losing market share quickly
- Metrics: friends, favorites, groups, impressions
- Helpful tools: Open Platform, MyApps, MySpace Toolbox
- Community mindset: connect
- Primary demographic: 35 to 55
- Ideal fit for: service providers, industry associations
- Biggest opportunity: creating thought leadership via Q&A and Groups
- Biggest challenge: time commitment
- Metrics: profile connections, best answers, group members, discussions
- Helpful tools: Applications, Salesforce plug-in
- Community mindset: create
- Primary demographic: 35 to 55
- Ideal fit for: technology
- Biggest opportunity: develop thought-leadership • Biggest challenge: requires significant resources over time
- Metrics: feed subscribers, comments, Technorati score, pingbacks, inbound links, visibility in search engines
- Helpful tools: WordPress plug-ins
- Community mindset: create (microblogging)
- Primary demographic: 35 to 45
- Ideal fit for: service industry
- Biggest opportunity: customer service, consumer insight, sales and marketing
- Biggest challenges: noisy; reliability issues; platform limitations
- Metrics: followers, @ replies, retweets, direct m essages, custom hashtags
- Helpful tools: BingTweets, TweetBeep, TweetDeck, HootSuite, CoTweet, Mr. Tweet, Twitalyzer, blog plug-ins
- Community mindset: vote
- Primary demographic: 25 to 45
- Ideal fit for: big brands and entertainment
- Biggest opportunity: creating viral content (e.g., United Breaks Guitars)
- Biggest challenges: noise; conversions
- Metrics: views, comments, subscribers, ratings
- Helpful tools: TubeMogul, YouTube Insight
Armed with company descriptions and links to social media content (images, videos, articles, and press releases), start creating social media profiles. Identify and address any potential issues relating to your company or products by following the success factors addressed earlier. Stay active in relevant communities. Monitor and engage as appropriate, offering suggestions, providing feedback and answering specific questions. For bonus points, participate in expert forums like Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Q&A to build thought leadership. Create and syndicate targeted, original content so the influencers can see it.
Remember, social networks are ideal for proactive online reputation management. Well-optimized profiles tend to appear in search results for your brand, which, in turn, block out less desirable content.
Social media can be time consuming, confusing and difficult to measure. By following the six steps outlined in the social media marketing checklist above, the marketing team at any company or nonprofit can outpace the competition and come out shining in the eyes of executive management and its customers.
Kent Lewis is a guest writer, and president of Anvil Media and Formic Media, two search engine and social media marketing agencies based in Portland, OR. On Twitter? Follow Lewis at @kentjlewis.
